i have not seen anyone comment on his part of the process,
so at the risk of talking out of my hat......

most foreign aid goes to a country to the person/people in charge, governments cannot be trusted to funnel that
aid to the people of the country. Time and time again we have seen morons in a position of power taking a huge chunk of money
earmarked for the poor in that country...

he can critcize the united states all he wants, he does have some
right to speak on anything he likes but it comes down to a basic
sense of jealousy for the world's superpower, us.

we throw away billions of dollars each year to help countries that ask or are offered help and we get it tossed back in our face-sooner or later the ante goes up and everyone wants more.

soon after the miners were taken out of the ground in Pennsylvania i read of an accident in a south african diamond mine where a whole slew of workers were killed. the paper noted that a mine official stated that people were killed in the accident.

that was it.....

how many days did we work on getting 7 people out of the ground?

by the same token how many days did we work on getting 7 people to go around the world in a shuttle?

different endings- but the drive and determination surely separate
us from everyone else on the planet.

we are a strange country, and we like to challenge ourselves
to do the things that are hard...and because we try the hard things we often stumble in the proccess..and when we stumble
we brush off our knees and keep on going. the whole world
sees us stumble, they laugh and point fingers.....

for once i'd like to see some little pissant country try some of the things that we have tried, succeed with them and keep on doing them......

everyone want the big kid on the block to be on their side
when the fight starts.....but they need to remember that
if you want to get along with that same big kid, behave yourself,
play nice and don't be stupid when it comes down to it.

big kids usually are the ones who do the ass kicking.

one last word on people commenting on the u.s. and what a bunch of punks we are.....an "i-wacky" official threatens us with
'thousands' of homicide bombers and an "i-wacky" car mechanic
says the Columbia disaster is 'god punishing' the u.s.

the media does a good job of making us feel like bullies, well, go
talk to a relative of a WTC victim and the thousands of Homicide bombers turn into thousands of GBU's dropped on Iraq, talk to the mechanic in smalltown, USA and he'll tell you that the
impending war is god punishing saddam for being a knucklehead.

it's all a matter of perspective.

sometimes kicking ass and taking names is the only option.

and, god forbid, should a terrorist ever think about pulling another 9/11 on us I hope that the people who are against the
effort to make the world safer take a real long look an the end result of that attack. sure, a war may just increase the possibility of more terrorist shenanigans but ask khadaffi, noriega, saddam, and osama what happens when you jerk the big guys chain.

if you oppose a war in the gulf then you should have no problem
picking up the cost of bio/chem/nuke attack on the United States.
After all, the money we save on bombs should just about cover the cost of burying thousands of smallpox victims, clearing debris
around a suicide bomber or building a fence around an area where a dirty nuke has been set off.